Simon Music Center, SM325C
Education
- Ph.D. in Music, Princeton University, 2005
- M.F.A. in Music, Princeton University, 1995
- B.A. (Laurea cum laude in Lettere), Universita degli Studi di Padova, 1992
Biography
Giovanni Zanovello is associate professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and director of the IU Renaissance Studies Program.
Zanovello’s scholarship and teaching explores the impact of organized sounds on the daily lives of individuals and social groups. He is interested in how individuals, families, governments, and institutions negotiated to maintain and innovate their soundscapes, rituals, and spontaneous music-making. His approach combines extensive archival research with a deep study of the history, topography, and materiality of early-modern cities, buildings, and as primary sources.
Zanovello’s current book project is Walking Into Sound: The Friary of Santissima Annunziata and the Auditory World of Monasticism in Renaissance Florence. Focusing on Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, he investigates the elite families and institutions that commissioned paintings and sculptures from Michelangelo, Leonardo, and others as well as the ordinary citizens who viewed them.
All Florentines also consumed music produced by elites and institutions, while also creating their own. This music, in turn, occurred in an urban soundscape rich with diverse sounds, such as speech, bells and other signals, animals, street noises, construction, industry, and more. This wide array of sounds helped citizens navigate the world and their place in it. Using insights from monastic studies, spatial theory, and auditory history, Zanovello seeks to inspire an imaginative engagement with the history of the city’s friaries and monasteries.
Zanovello’s international training in the humanities and music history has encouraged him to explore his scholarly interests from other angles. Topics he has studied include the biography and work of composer Heinrich Isaac (ca.1450-1517), the musical identity of the Padua cathedral, the complex relationship between classical learning and music-making, and the material, social, and stylistic peculiarities of Italian songs in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.
Research Interests
- Archives, archival silences; notated manuscripts and early music prints
- Auditory history; embodiment and emplacement in historical narrative
- Classical learning and music in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
- Florence, Padua, and Venice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
- Heinrich Isaac (c.1450-1517)
- Improvisation and unwritten musical traditions
- Italian song in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Italian poetry for music
- Monastic history
- Musical institutions
- Working-class people and their music in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; music in early-modern rural areas
Selected Publications
“Einstein's Frottola und ihr Erbe.” In Alfred Einstein's “Versuch einer Geschichte der italienischen Profanmusik im 16. Jahrhundert” und die Folgen, edited by Sebastian Bolz, Moritz Kelber and Katelijne Schiltz, 267-77. Troja. Jahrbuch für Renaissancemusik 20. Dresden: Musiconn, 2025.
Isaac, Heinrich. Choralis Constantinus II. Edited by David J. Burn, Ruth I. DeFord, and Stefan Gasch, with the assistance of Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Texts, and Marianne C.E. Gillion, Monophonic Chant. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 115:2. Heinrich Isaac, Collected Works. General Editor Giovanni Zanovello. Münster, Germany: American Institute of Musicology, 2025.
“Lo strambotto musicale quattrocentesco tra oralità e scrittura,” Italique 26 (2023), 60-76.
“Heinrich Isaac and the Vernacular Solmization Pun.” Musiktheorie 35, no. 3 (2020): 211-24.
“Isaac, Schubinger, and Maximilian in Pisa: A Window of Opportunity?” In Henricus Isaac (c.1450/5-1517): Composition, Reception, Interpretation, edited by Stefan Gasch, Markus Grassl and August Valentin Rabe, 1-8. Vienna: Hollitzer, 2019 (with Nicole Schwindt).
“The frottola in the Veneto.” In A Companion to Music in Sixteenth-century Venice, edited by Katelijne Schiltz, 395-414. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
“‘You Will Take This Sacred Book’: The Musical Strambotto as a Humanistic Gift.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 141 (2016): 1-26.
“‘In the Church and in the Chapel’: Music and Devotional Spaces in the Florentine Church of Santissima Annunziata.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014): 379-428.
“Absorbing Heinrich Isaac.” The Journal of Musicology 28 (2011): 1-8. (With David J. Burn and Blake Wilson).
“‘Master Arigo Ysach, Our Brother’: New Light on Isaac in Florence, 1502-1517.” The Journal of Musicology 25 (2008): 287-317.
“Les humanistes florentins et la polyphonie liturgique.” In Poétiques de la Renaissance: Le modèle italien, le monde franco-bourguignon et leur héritage en France au XVIe siècle, edited by Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn, 625-638, 667-673, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, no. 348. Genève: Librairie Droz, 2001.
Recent Talks and Presentations
“Walking Into Sound.” First International Conference of the IMS Study Group Auditory History, “The Historical Ear: What is Auditory History?” Paris (France), The University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris / Institut de recherche en Musicologie (IReMus), scheduled for 18–21 March 2026.
“Popularizing and Rural Elements in Italian Songs, ca. 1500.” 52nd Medieval and Renaissance International Music Conference. Granada, Spain, July 6-9, 2024.
“Because the Big Shot Enjoys Them.” 51st Medieval and Renaissance International Music Conference. Munich, Germany, July 24-28, 2023.
“Monk See Monk Do? Crossing the Monastic Soundscape of Fifteenth-Century Florence.” 50th Medieval and Renaissance International Music Conference. Uppsala, Sweden, July 4-7, 2022.
“Einstein’s Frottola and Its Legacy.” Das italienische Madrigal: Alfred Einsteins “Versuch einer Geschichte der italienischen Profan-Musik im 16. Jahrunderdt” un die Folgen. Munich, Germany, March 16-18, 2022.
“The Sounds of Liturgy: A Dialogue Between Monastic Communities and Citizens in Florence.” Radboud Universiteit & Research Group “Observer l'Observance” Virtual Conference: Observant Reforms and Cultural Production in Europe. June 9-11, 2021.
Recent Courses
- Heinrich Isaac
- Historical Sound Studies
- Italian Opera
- Latergrams
- Music and Institutions
- Music and Place
- Music Collectorship
- Music in Early-Modern Cities
- Renaissance Music
- Survey of Operatic Literature
- The Masses of Josquin Des Prez
- The Motet from the Middle Ages to the 18th Century
- Western Music in Context to 1800
Selected Grants and Awards
- Faculty Fellowship, Indiana University Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities
- Indiana University New Frontiers in the Arts & Humanities Program Grant
- Jacques-Handschin-Preis of the Swiss Society of Musicology
- Francesco de Dombrowski Fellowship from Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies
- Poste Rouge at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)
- Assegno di Ricerca from the University of Padoa